The Tale of Two Villages: The Invisible Linkage

This paper presents our participant observation in two urbanized villages in the northern suburb of Beijing. One is Dongxiaokou (DXK), a concentrated garbage sorting/trading center, which expanded unexpectedly in the 2000s and crashed recently due to urban expansion, illustrating the distressing challenge of waste as it is gradually exposed to urban governance in China. The other is Zhenggezhuang (ZGZ), an urbanized village built by the local collective entity not far away from DXK. We initiated a community-based recycling program in this village. With the background of the municipality's efforts to remake the waste/recycling space into an “urban circular economic system”, we address the evolution of diversification and constant linkage between these two villages. In conclusion, we generalize the result of the research to give implications to the cross-scale interactions among the community action, the urban waste management system and the producer responsibility scheme.